Rose McLarney’s collections of poems are “Colorfast,” “Forage” and “Its Day Being Gone,” from Penguin Poets, as well as “The Always Broken Plates of Mountains,” published by Four Way Books. She is co-editor of “A Literary Field Guide to Southern Appalachia,” from University of Georgia Press, and the journal Southern Humanities Review. Rose has been awarded fellowships by MacDowell and Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers’ Conferences; served as Dartmouth Poet in Residence at the Frost Place; and is winner of the National Poetry Series, the Chaffin Award for Achievement in Appalachian Writing, and the Fellowship of Southern Writers’ New Writing Award for Poetry, among other prizes. Her work has appeared in publications including American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, New England Review, Prairie Schooner, Orion, and The Oxford American. Currently, she is Professor of Creative Writing at Auburn University.

Justin Gardiner is the author of three books: the long-form lyric essay “Small Altars,” winner of a Faulkner-Wisdom Nonfiction Book Award and published by Tupelo Press in 2024; “Beneath the Shadow: Legacy and Longing in the Antarctic,” published as part of the Crux Literary Nonfiction Series by the University of Georgia Press; and the poetry collection “Naming the Lifeboat” from Main Street Rag. In 2012–2013, Justin served as the Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Fellow, living for a year at an off-grid homestead in the middle of the Rogue River Wilderness. He is a graduate of Warren Wilson’s MFA Program for Writers, where he was awarded both the Larry Levis Post-Graduate Stipend and the Joan Beebe Teaching Fellowship. His essays and poems have appeared in journals that include The Missouri Review, Blackbird, Quarterly West, Zone 3, and Catamaran. Currently, he is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Auburn University and serves as the Nonfiction Editor of the Southern Humanities Review.

The Visiting Writers Reading Series is sponsored by the Department of English, the Office of the Provost and Dean of the Faculty, the Lawrence Parke Murphy and Robert Goldstein Trust, and by generous donations from the extended Whitman community.